Whether it is a Snickers bar, a bag of
Cheetos, a Monster drink or an ice cream cone, students are enjoying
junk food in supersize mode, and they don’t have to worry about any
unhealthy side effects.

The junk food is actually supersized sculptures — at least 4 feet in height or width — created for an art class project.

The giant junk-food sculptures were inspired by the work of sculptor Claes Oldenburg, who does enormous sculptures of everyday
objects that are erected in public places, art teacher Tony Lindeman said.

“The nice thing about it was we were studying this artist, and he was just unveiling one of his newer pieces in Pennsylvania
— a ginormous paint brush,” Lindeman said. “The students were all intrigued because it’s not just a past artist. This is a
current, modern artist we were studying. They really took hold of what we were doing.”

In fact, the middle school art students were impressed with Oldenburg’s work.

Special to Commercial-Express/Phyllis RoseA giant box of theater popcorn was the sculpture created by seventh grader Chloe Jones, and eighth graders Kelly Johnson, and Joshua Peter.

“It was amazing,” said seventh-grader Chloe Jones. “It was cool seeing how big it was and how he incorporated gravity, making
things look like they were tipping over.”

So, in the gigantic box of theater popcorn that Chloe and her group created, they tried to make the popcorn look like it was
falling out of the box, but they couldn’t get it to work, she said.

For eighth-grader Miranda Smith, Oldenburg’s work was “pretty cool.”

“Making things into big things would be hard,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to do that, but it would be interesting.”

Added eighth-grader Lauren Geesaman, “If he hadn’t done it, I didn’t think it would be possible to make things that big. They
were really good.”

Her favorite Oldenburg sculpture is one in which bowling pins fly through the air after being hit by a bowling ball.

“It looked impossible to make, but he made it possible,” she said.

Of the bowling-pin sculpture, eighth-grader Brittney Moldovan said, “The pins are flying up in the air. He got so much color
and life into the subject.”

Following their study of Oldenburg’s art, students had to create a junk food sculpture that was at least 4 feet high or wide,
but some students went well beyond the 4-foot requirement, Lindeman said.

Students worked in groups of three and once they’d chosen their junk-food subject, they

Phyllis Rose/ Special to the Commercial-ExpressStanding next to their monster-sized Monster can sculpture are the creators of the sculpture, eighth graders Miranda Smith and Morgan Keith.

had to figure out the dimensions for
the giant sculpture, Lindeman said.

Eighth-grader Joshua Peter and his teammates Chloe and Kelly Johnson chose to do a bag of theater popcorn.

“It seemed like something different instead of a packaged thing,” Joshua said.

The math posed some problems for Miranda and Morgan Keith as they planned their Monster can sculpture.

“We had to measure the little can, and then triple the dimensions,” Morgan said. “We had Mr. Lindeman check our math.”

With plans in place, students then took cardboard and created the skeletal understructure for the papier mache, Lindeman said.

For Miranda, the hardest part was the circular structure of the Monster drink can.

“Making the circle was kind of hard, but I like challenges,” she said.

Mixing the paints to get just the right color to match the original junk food container or wrapper was challenging, too.

Brittney, Amanda Swope and Lauren Geesaman chose to do a bag of Cheetos, because they wanted to do something in bright colors.

In the end, that meant mixing a lot of orange paint that wasn’t quite right so they had to keep mixing, Lauren said.

Once the paint was the right color, the fun part for Amanda was painting the bag.

“The cheetah on the bag had lots of detail. It was fun to paint,” she said.

But students also learned a lot through this project.

For Brittney, that was learning about the structure.

“I learned how to bend the cardboard pieces so it looked like the actual object,” she said.

From an art teacher’s perspective, the learning also came from exploring a different art form.

“Students get to work with 3-D sculpture instead of just drawing or painting or working on a 2-D surface,” Lindeman said.

The gigantic junk food sculptures are displayed around the school — over lockers, in display cases, in a hallway corner, by
the front door and even high on the wall in the cafeteria.

The sculptures will be on display until next semester’s art students create their versions of giant junk food.